Ginzburg

Aviel Ginzburg: Despite having worked on projects together in the past, and the appearance of complementary skill sets, it occurred to Damon and I that in all of the past projects we always had others involved to carry some of the weight.

We’d heard plenty of horror stories from our friends and former colleagues about startups falling to pieces when push comes to shove. Everything would seem great. People would be executing. A product would be well underway. But then an external pressure would take hold.

It could be pressure to hit the market at the right time or simply that the startup was running out of money. Whatever the case, the fact that the team hadn’t worked together previously in a similar situation seemed to always lead to miscalculations of who was responsible for what, and in what time frame.

Previous Installments:
Taking the startup plunge, and taking you along for the ride.

Who owns what? How to split equity in a startup company.

When you’re running out of time, you have to anticipate the actions of your co-workers and do more than just react. You can’t just focus on executing on your own responsibilities and expect everything to work out.

I learned that lesson the hard way years ago on location film shoots. A perfect shot is worth nothing without perfect acting. And with a startup, you generally don’t get second chances, so it’s better to fail early and often.

Rather than waiting until our company was on the line to explore the kinks in our partnership, we decided to create some artificial pressure, and tasked ourselves with building a simple application in 48 hours (in time for the oneforty.com payments launch).

We even upped the ante by announcing our plan, so there was no going back.

The first 24 hours went smoothly.

Damon focused on building out the infrastructure and I executed on the front end and user experience.

Thirty hours in, we hit our first roadblock.

A major assumption about the payments platform we were using simply wasn’t accurate. We had both looked at the documentation, and had apparently assumed that the other had gone more in-depth.

We had to back-step, adjust, and lost five hours catching back up. Now five hours isn’t much, but in the scope of a 48-hour project, it’s almost a week.

The lesson learned: despite being under time pressure, it’s still worth investing in sufficient research and planning.

Even more than that, take stock in who’s doing the research and to what extent.

I would take losing an extra 30 minutes on reading documentation over the possibility of a lengthy detour any day.

But our troubles by no means ended there.

As time started to wind down we forgot who was tasked with what and to what extent. Damon had built out the backend to the extent where he thought I could connect to it, and I had built out the front end in other places with the same expectation. We had both executed our own responsibilities, but hadn’t bent enough to reach out and connect the pieces.

The worst part though, is that because we had assumed our task was done, we moved on to other less essential tasks, and lost a considerable amount of time. The lesson learned: you’re not done until you’ve connected all the pieces.

Not only that, connecting the pieces can take a LONG time. Working under an unreasonable timeframe, the “little things” got eclipsed by larger priorities, but you simply cannot forget about them.

As with most projects, the devil was in the details. Admittedly, we didn’t make the 48-hour deadline, but we did finish in 55, barely making the oneforty.com launch.

But a large reason for missing the deadline was a conscious choice, and the final lesson we learned.

Sometimes you need to put your personal life first.

As time wound down, fate was against us.

Almost simultaneously, Damon’s girlfriend (who eats shrimp all the time) got shellfish poisoning, and my girlfriend had her tires slashed in a parking lot in Belltown.

We stopped what we were doing and jumped in to help them. Damon and I are alike on this.

We may be workaholics, but we’ll never put work before our loved ones if they’re in trouble. And this definitely won’t be the first time a loved one needs us, so it’s invaluable to know that our priorities are on the same page.

We will never penalize the other under such conditions.

All in all, the 48-hour experiment was a success.

We learned some valuable lessons at little cost, and gained considerable confidence in our abilities as a team with the knowledge that we could successfully execute under time pressure. We also launched our first “product.”

I am a big fan of events like Startup Weekend and the now retired 6-Hour-Startup.

But even if those events aren’t for you, I highly recommend this experiment to all co-founders. I’ll be following up this post with another on how we act upon what we learned from this experiment.

Editor's Note: Startup Confidential is written by Aviel Ginzburg and Damon Cortesi. The series will follow the ups and downs of the Seattle technology entrepreneurs as they try to get their new business, tentatively called Untitled Startup, off the ground.